Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday May 07, 2012 @06:05PM
from the might-execute-a-few-to-show-they're-serious dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Dave Lindorff writes in the LA Times that growing numbers of students are discovering their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree by refusing to issue an official transcript. The schools won't send the transcripts to potential employers or graduate admissions office if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind. It's no accident that they're doing this. It turns out the federal government 'encourages' them to use this draconian tactic, saying that the policy 'has resulted in numerous loan repayments.' It is a strange position for colleges to take, writes Lindorff, since the schools themselves are not owed any money — student loan funds come from private banks or the federal government, and in the case of so-called Stafford loans, schools are not on the hook in any way. They are simply acting as collection agencies, and in fact may get paid for their efforts at collection. 'It's worse than indentured servitude,' says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. 'With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.'"

Wow 60% huh? I'm guessing because you're shunning ignorance and embracing science, that you simply hit enter before actually providing us with the source for a number. I mean, what kind of a idiot would base such a bold statement on his mere feelings.

I wager that it was a guess, remember 7.24*10^42% of all statistics are made up on the spot (oh damn fox did I go over 100%?), the idea is that people keep voting on the majority against science and pro ignorance (I should know, I live in Kansas...), request citation from my state and I'll spend some actual time pulling it up. I can't make truth or false on his claim with sources, but I definitely get his sentiment.

I will at least bring this to the table though, many fundamentalist Christians see science as a direct attack on their religion and I cite Galileo, the book burnings of the dark ages, evolution, vaccines, personhood rights (pray that god doesn't take you if your child will cost you your life, this is medical science which opens a whole ball park), etc. There's also a movement in the christian sector that support science and believe that man wrote the bible and is literally meant to be taken as allegory. But those seem far and few between because those who are most radical tend to have the loudest voices, and mob mentality listens to those who speak the loudest.

When a society fails, fear is created. Fear of failure, unemployment, homelessness, destroyed relationships and depression. We are now seeing the results of our government's change to the laws that favored wall street and moneyed interests. The last bastion for personal confidence after all has failed is religion. What we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg for the chaos that is coming .

The American education system itself isn't that bad. It's not the best, but it's not the worst, either.

One huge problem is that the schooling (schooling, not education) centers around rote memorization and teaching to the test. How things work, why they work, how to apply them... those kinds of questions are nonexistent in most cases.

Depends on your state. In my state (Massachusetts) there's a heavy emphasis on reasoning skills. Consequently we're at or near the top of the heap in terms of the percentage of 8th graders who test as "advanced" in mathematics (17% vs. 7% for the country as a whole), for reading comprehension (5% vs. 2% for the nation as a whole) and science (5% vs 2.9% nation-wide) . My daughter just returned from an exchange program in Hamburg, Germany, and reports that gymnasium students there don't work nearly as long and hard, and our students don't lag in anything but free time. She's taking 10th grade geometry, and every week there are at least one or two problems that are extremely difficult for *me*, and I was good enough at math to go to MIT. Granted it's honors math, but still.

If you want to see how your state ranks in mathematics or reading, you can go here. [ed.gov]. If students in your state are ignorant, illiterate or intellectually passive, don't blame American culture. Blame the people running your state. Chances are they're looking for someone to blame, too.

One huge problem is that the schooling (schooling, not education) centers around rote memorization and teaching to the test.

Which grad school did you go to, that was centered around "rote memorization"?

When students from all over the world stop lining up to come to our grad schools, we can talk.

This article was about college loans, and the corporatization of higher education. Of course we're going to be paying more and getting less, as long as our universities continue to follow a corporate model. That's the way corporations work. Profits come from giving a customer less than he paid for.

In the 80's, when I started my academic career (well before I got tenure) I noticed a distinct transformation in university administration. More academic bigwigs read the latest business management self-help guide than read St Augustine or Plato. Endowments were treated like corporate war-chests. Three-piece suits replaced tweed jackets with suede elbow-patches.

And it went downhill from there. Universities decided that they didn't really have any responsibility to society, they only had a responsibility to the "market". And having a relative monopoly on credentials, they began to raise their prices to whatever the market would bear. I started noticing a lot more "Associate Deans" in departments that were not academics at all, but transplanted corporate middle management. C-level executive jobs started going to corporate stars, not educators. And the salaries and bonuses and golden parachutes followed right behind. Any of you who've worked in academic know what I'm talking about. One day I noticed that the CIO of my institution was a former Sun exec who got an unbelievable compensation package from the school. A few years later, when Sun crashed, it was easy to see why he had been so happy to take the university's offer. And he was a fuckwit. I think he later became the CIO of a big Ivy school after our IT had been thoroughly trashed. Like many corporate execs, he failed his way to the top. He likes to be on corporate boards, I have heard, naturally.

A belief started in the early '80s, that universities needed to be "run like businesses", as if there was something salutary about the corporate culture of Wall Street. And as you might expect, running a university "like a business" has turned it to very expensive shit, where a graduate leaves the institution with more in the debit column than the credit column. And it got worse and worse and though I tried to insulate myself from it I eventually just walked away and retired on my 50th birthday. Fuck it. If I wanted to work in corporate culture, I'd have gone for the money in the first place.

Oh, by the way, the same people who had the bright idea that universities should be "run like businesses" also brought us the notion that government should be "run like a business". That if we just put some business douchebag in charge of the shooting match, everything will be just fine. The only problem is, almost none of the people that those institutions are supposed to serve happen to be shareholders. As universities, and governments start to be run like corporations, we are finding that students and citizens are seen as consumables, not consumers. And certainly not shareholders. The expendibles.

This is because, for a lot of people, the 'free market' is basically a religion. It lets them be as greedy as they want to be and classify that behavior as good and moral so they refuse to acknowledge that there's any situation where 'running things like a business' isn't the correct solution.

Simple answers are always easier to sell people on than complex ones, even if they're not right, especially if it lets people do what they want to do anyway and feel good about doing it. It doesn't help that we spent most of the 20th Century blasting every with propaganda extolling the virtues of the free market and the evils of socialism.

Woah... That was an epic Slashdot circle jerk. You managed to bag on all the elitist neckbeard enemies in one post. Hipsters, gangstas, religious fanactics all in one post and blame them for something completely unreleasted you got upvoted to Score:4 Interesting! Congratulations!

There's another large portion of Americans who aspire to be nothing more than "gangstas". Even when involving a curriculum developed by non-whites and taught by non-whites, these people still insist on rejecting "the white man's education".

"Large" you say? Based on what standard?

But these days, we're talking about 60% or more of Americans who willfully and voluntarily reject a useful education. That's a recipe for disaster.

Everyone keeps asking for citation, it's extremely easy to find it if you actually look [pfaw.org]!

80% of American's think creationism should be discussed in schools, 60% think it should be discussed in science classes.

Depending on how you ask the questions and what answers you allow, you can get better than these numbers (these are, admittedly, the worst that I've seen) but it's very hard, no matter how you ask, to get more than 25% of Americans to agree with: "Evolution should be taught and creationism has no place

They also reject a useful education, either in favor of mooching off of their wealthy parents, or by studying a field that offers absolutely no job prospects and no real-world value.

Actually there used to be a time when people valued "non-useful" fields, but now we expect college to be a glorified trade school training purpose built drones. I went to school for philosophy, actually, and upon entering the program we got to see a nice graph showing that our entry level earning was lower than most "specialized" fields, had a much higher top-cap, since we were being trained to think. Not think about a single task, but to be, basically, generalists.

As someone who grew up in and lives in a highly religious area, people don't really shy away from STEM fields for religious reasons that often. The human brain can remarkably work around flaws in logic (mostly because even well trained we don't think logically). There are some big obvious places that fundamentalist Christians will deny science in favor of religion but many embrace science in many other areas. The problem is more that we value talent based careers far more than STEM. The dream that I can

I was incredibly fortunate to be able to call my department head and speak with him, he personally corresponded with the background check agency and it was finally accepted that I wasn't lying, however, they said that I couldn't list the degree on my resume. This was in 2005 by the way.

...what happens if a student contacts the lender and informs them of the problem. I know people who have done this, lenders understand and generally work with you if you explain the situation. Not so much if you just stop making payments.

That was my exact situation, in 1997. Unemployment had caused me to fall behind on the student loan. Needed a transcript for the new job. Called them. Funny enough "let me have a transcript so I can get the job that will result in you getting paid back" seemed reasonable to them too.

They have a very big interest in student loans; without affordable loans the number of students would drop dramatically. Students who don't pay back their loans are costing everyone who does make their payments extra in the form of higher interest rates. Instead of getting a big attitude, try working with the system instead of against it.

without affordable loans the number of students would drop dramatically.

Without student loans, the price of education would drop dramatically.

Inexpensive, readily available student loans have the same effect on the cost of education as inexpensive, readily available home loans did on the cost of property during the housing bubble - they give the purchaser far more purchasing power than they would normally have, resulting in the price of the product being bid up much higher than its value.

Considering almost no one pays for college without loans today, any college whose students could not get loans would be dead in the water. That gives a lot of leverage for banks to "ask" colleges to play along.

Then there is the unspoken truth that most of these degrees are worthless. If banks ever released official statistics on what degrees from which colleges resulted in the most defaults, it would hurt a lot of programs. (and immensely help out prospective students, but who cares about that?)

Considering almost no one pays for college without loans today, any college whose students could not get loans would be dead in the water. That gives a lot of leverage for banks to "ask" colleges to play along.

The idea that people can't go to school without loans is complete bullshit. I am going to graduate next year, and I paid for my entire education out of my own picket. I've never had a job that paid more than $10 an hour. I served in the military for one year (discharged due to problems with eyesight) so I only had a few months worth of GI bill, which didn't pay much at all. Beyond that, I paid for everything myself. Books, tuition, transportation, everything. I paid for it. Not my parents, not my relatives. All me.

And this isn't hard to do either, all you have to do is save up money and not spend it on stupid shit, e.g. your new ipad every time apple releases one, and your regular visits to starbucks (people don't need $4 cups of coffee twice a day to survive.) I've probably spent about $25,000 on college so far, and I still have about $14,000 saved up. I really don't understand how some people can spend $80,000 on college to get something as worthless as a liberal arts degree, and then wonder why they can't get a job. To me, getting a degree that there is no market for is stupid, you may as well just save the money and get no degree at all. Taking out a student loan is even more stupid.

One big mistake I notice a lot, is that a lot of people seem to go straight to university. This is the dumb, because universities are always overpriced for what you get. Community colleges (especially in places like California) are DIRT CHEAP. I pay upwards of $2,000 per year, that includes summer school, and includes books. Imagine that, a month and a half of pay for an entire year. Plus, community colleges by far tend to have a much better student to teacher ratio (which means if you have a learning disability like I do, your chances of succeeding are much greater,) the learning environment is also therefore more personal so the teachers tend to care more about the students than their status, and in addition to that they tend to offer free tutoring, and it's very good tutoring too.

Another thing is books. I don't know why, but so many students buy their books from the in school book store. This is stupid, they charge a lot more than Amazon, and better yet if you look on ebay, you can buy the international editions which are essentially the same thing, only they are made of cheaper paper, but cost a hell of a lot less.

Also if you don't dedicate yourself to college properly, you won't get shit. And dedication is all it takes. I don't consider myself to be that smart, yet I have a 3.9 GPA. People who say you have to be smart to do that don't know what they're talking about. When I was in high school I was just like the average person I see in college: I didn't give a shit and just did the minimum I needed to get D's because that's all that was required to pass. In college you're required to get C's to pass, so that's the grade I see the most people get. TV gives this impression that college is the time to smoke weed and drink beer at dorm parties, and I'm telling you right now that it's not. College is when you're supposed to work the hardest.

My dedication has paid off already by the way. I just got hired for an internship at a fortune 500 company that pays a lot more money than I've ever earned (think: how often do internships pay anything at all?) I didn't even need to interview, they just asked for my resume and then hired me because of the reputation I've earned at school.

I don't want to hear any crying from people who can't pay off their student loans, that's their own problem that they created from their own stupidity, and they better damn sure fulfill their obligations. The occupy movement sits around doing nothing while demanding jobs, meanwhile I've been working my ass off to earn a job. The occupy movement can eat my ass, I am not part of their 99%.

So, do pray tell, how much did you pay for rent, electricity, and heat while doing that?

Or, don't tell me, you're yet another one of those special little snowflakes who can just stay at mommy and daddy's place until everything is perfect.

Get off your high horse you idiot.

On the other hand, I own a home and I've never had a degree. I even had loans to pay off after my ex-parents decided I was actually a demon who had killed their son and taken his form. Pain killers and prednisone and alcohol: it's bad for

Interesting you bring up my parents. Both of them actually have no income. My dad was a mechanic for 30+ years and finally wore out his back (he has a family history of back problems, which made it worse) and he can no longer work. He's trying to start a used car sales business, and I've actually loaned him $8k for that. My mom had a work injury back in December and fractured one of her vertebra. Her workman's comp has been thus far denied, so she has no income. In spite of my dad maxing out his contributio

I probably earn way more than you, but I pay my taxes and endorse socialism gladly in the knowing that it helps me to avoid living near sad and bitter buggers like you.

If you live in a first world country, then it's likely you do earn more than I do. However depending on your location, your standard of living could still be much lower than mine, even if you live in an area with a higher standard of living index. Take for example somebody who lives in new york. Way higher standard of living than where I live

My local wisconsin tech school where I got my 2-year 20 years ago charged about $1300 for 12 credits, today its only $1400 but with almost uncountable bogus extra fees ('technology" "activity" and the latest, I kid you not, is mandatory liability insurance) its $1600. If you attend 2 semesters a year, that's $60/week out of your takehome pay. My takehome pay was about $200/week (about $7/hr full time, I got almost all the rest back in the income tax return). That would have only left me $560/month to pay

My parents paid cash for me (and then I paid them back once I had a job). ~$80,000 really isn't that much money if you learn to SACRIFICE and save you money instead of throwing it away on Comcast cable, Verizon cellservice, and other shit that you really (to be brutally honest) do not need.

So, you're saying everyone should just have parents who SACRIFICED their whole life (and had a good job) so kiddo can get a degree interest free?

Interesting. I'm certain your experience is that of the everyman. No doubt.

Naturally, out society should be based on the premise that one's success in life should be based on how much effort your parents put into paying your way up the ladder.

The problem is that subsidized loans are probably the absolute worst way to make college available to more people. A loan distorts the supply-demand model by allowing people to shift money from the future into the present. What happens when people suddenly have more money to spend on something with a limited supply? The price goes up. As tuitions have been, far outpacing the rate of inflation.

Loans for college are a demand-side solution. We allow time-shifting of money to increase demand, more money flows to colleges, and in response colleges expand and more colleges get built. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. What's actually been happening is that big-name colleges have a monopoly on their name. So instead of increasing supply (hiring more professors and and admitting more students), they've just been ratcheting up their tuitions to match the increased availability of money due to loans. Then they use the higher tuitions as circular reasoning for why we need more loans.

We need a supply-side solution. One that makes college available to more people by increasing supply directly. e.g. Cut off student loans, put the money into public universities instead. Yeah it's not perfect - poor kids won't be able to get into expensive private colleges. But it's a damn sight better than inflating tuition prices for everyone by 200%-300%, and consigning poor students to a decade or more of debt after they graduate. At this point, we need to use the public universities to exert downward pressure on the market price of tuition to fix the damage done by decades of cheap school loans.

The problem is a bunch of entitled, snotty little kids that believe the internet is a fundamental human right, who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Everything is a right these days.

Here you are making a gross generalization of the problem, with in a nutshell is as follows: 1) a raise in tuition costs, combined with 2) greater difficulty in getting a decent job without a 4-year degree (*point elaborated more at the end of this post)

A college education is not one of those.

Why not? Again, why exactly not? Now, again, I'm not advocating for it to be a free-for-all-right, but I would like to know why people get so cranky about the subject. To be honest, and to qualify my statement (which is already off the tangent) is that it sh

You can't work until you start paying us back and you can't pay us back until you start work.Seems a bizzare way of organising things. In the UK you can't pay back your student loans until you earn a certain minimum wage and then it starts to come out from your pay like a tax as a percentage of your wage. And like the summary says it is the government who hold the debt, not the individual Universities/colleges. If they really want to stop the problem of defaulting then surely it would make more sense to reduce the number of degress that didn't have much job prospects, rather then block the people with degrees from getting jobs.

In the USA not all student loans are through the government. Some of mine were, and some of mine weren't. The ones that were I didn't have to start paying until I got a job or after a certain time period. When I became unemployed I could put them on hold without paying interest until I became employed again.

I agree it's a crappy thing for the government to pressure schools to do, but it's not at all like the analogy the NYU prof has put forth. It's more like buying a lawnmower for your landscaping business on a loan, then not repaying the loan. Just because the bank repossesses the lawnmower does not mean they're depriving you of your ability to get work. It just means you cannot use the lawnmower to help you find landscaping work, at least until you start making the loan payments.

My university's colors are green and gold. It helped make it clear that my relationship with the university was strictly a business transaction -- I gave them money and passed the classes, they gave me the degree. There is no further relationship, and they get no further money from me. Ever.

If I was a lawyer I'd look at this as a Great opportunity to file a class-action lawsuit. As the summary states the colleges are not owed any money, therefore they hve Zero grounds to hold hostage the record of the students 4-5 years. They are committing a crime (charged money but did not provide the final document promised in the contract).

She concedes it's a difficult issue but says that "it's the only tool we have to make them pay."

A music major... was making payments on his $62,000 student debt after graduation while working as an adjunct professor for Temple.

So we have institutions lending $62,000 to majors that have terrible job prospects, then when they can't get jobs they don't know how to get the money back... okay. How about don't lend that much money to someone who you can be pretty sure won't pay the money back? I know higher education should be accessible to all and this and that, but perhaps 62 grand for a degree in music should give us pause to reconsider a) why does a degree in music cost 62 grand and b) why does someone want to spend 62 grand for a degree in music.

I can partiall answer b). I was at a advisory board meeting for my university's CSE department recently, and some undergrads were asked the question: "So what is tuition now?" No one could answer. They don't even KNOW that they are paying $40k+ a year in tuition. This is because they don't even look at their bill. They fill out the fafsa, press a button, sign some papers, and get free money that gives another year of partying. The reality only hits them AFTER they graduate and look back at their full bill. This attitude on the student's side has got to stop

There's also the attitude on the institution side, that they can loan someone $60k for a degree in basket weaving and reasonably expect to get it back. This has to stop as well, but I don't know how to fix it.

Simple. Well maybe not simple but the solution is to have companies stop requiring a bachelor's degree as a minimum requirement for every single job out there. This has watered down what university used to be. No longer is it a place of higher learning, higher thinking, and higher reasoning. Instead it has become a mill churning out tomorrow's workforce.

It's things like this that make me hate the entire crooked system. The federal gov't wants more people to go to college, so they tell the financial institutions "Hey, lend these people all the money you want, we'll make sure they pay it back even if they declare bankruptcy." Meanwhile, the state gov't, elected on a platform of lowering taxes while providing all the same services (the essential contradiction of basically all elected governments), decides to slash education spending. The universities scramble to cut costs but immediate stop when they figure out that the banks are perfectly happy to lend $100,000 to 18 year-olds with no credit history and instead jack up their tuition. At the end of this wretched cycle, you've completely transferred all of the burden to people who took out loans because they couldn't pay for college in the first place and all the kids with rich parents can't seem to figure out what all the fuss is about. Even the kids who get scholarships are screwed because they generally don't scale to handle increasing tuition rates. My freshman year of college, my scholarship paid for an entire year's worth of tuition. By the end of my senior year, it covered less than one semester.

Adjunct faculty are basically the academic equivalents of temps (no benefits, low pay, term-by-term contract) or are only working part-time while making their living from another job (e.g., professional musician teaching on the side). Generally, not "a pretty good job".

There's also the attitude on the institution side, that they can loan someone $60k for a degree in basket weaving and reasonably expect to get it back. This has to stop as well, but I don't know how to fix it.

Start by restructuring most universities' athletic departments. Most rely on funds from the university to get by. Rutgers University students are paying an extra $1,000 each year to fund football. University of Colorado-Boulder actually had to postpone firing their football coach a few years ago because the athletic department was still repaying the loan it took out to fire the previous football coach.

You can't realistically shut all these athletic departments down, but you ought to be able to put a halt to sending a guy on his way with an extra $3 million in his account.

I was under the impression that the sports, especially football, were net positive because they helped get donations to the school. That said, I never understood why some people are promised huge chunks of money for doing a bad job and getting fired.

If your dreams don't involve a high probability of actually getting paid then maybe you need to think twice about accumulating a crushing debt to reach them. Same advice as for all those kids who want to become rockstars, movie stars, or professional athletes - great, reach for your dream, but take a realistic look at your chances of success and make sure you have a plan B or expect to be in a world of hurt.

Seems to me what we really need to do is start teaching high-school kids how to manage money - perhaps a mandatory Home Ec class that actually has a strong focus on, you know, the *economics* of running a household. How do the costs of cooking versus eating out compare over the course of a year? How does the tax system work? What is the real cost of a loan and how does it vary based on repayment rate? What are the costs and benefits of a college education? Etc,etc,etc. I'd bet that'd benefit most high school students a heck of a lot more than a year of mandatory PhysEd.

Another front in the war on fiscal incompetence: convince parents to stop giving their kids money - I mean how are kids supposed to learn the value of the dollar when you can always get more by asking Mom or Dad? Lets get back to the good old days - you get a fixed weekly allowance in return for doing your chores, scaled to cover your expected expenses plus a bit of spending money. Especially by high school food, clothes, etc. should probably all be included in those expenses so that they get some real practice with opportunity costs in the presence of a non-negligible income stream. If they absolutely *must* have something they can't afford then *loan* them the money with a definite repayment schedule.

They don't have that problem because their "loans" are repaid through taxes that are forcefully taken from your paycheck - as opposed to student loans in the US where you have to send them a check / go online and pay your bill each month. It's easy to have 100% repayment when you get to confiscate the person's money before they ever get their paycheck.

The schools have been paid, have they not? That's the whole point of a loan - lender pays now, and you pay the lender.

And, as others have said, it's a little short-sighted to stand in the way of those in debt, since the best way for them to pay off those loans is to be successful. Again, that's the whole point.

Any institution engaging in this sort of behavior is way out of line. In fact, it's rather rare to see such a clear-cut case of wrongdoing when it comes to financial/political entanglements.

Back off, universities. You are not moral guardians, gatekeepers, or creditors. You are educational institutions, and your obligation is to the students, not to whatever twisted group of people suggested you monitor you alumni for credit score violations.A declining credit score is already one hell of a millstone - like weight gain, it's much easier to damage your score than improve it. The last thing we need is universities undercutting those students who need their credentials the most - those who essentially gambled a portion of future success on the hopes of a beneficial education. Do they want us to pay our loans off or not?

They will give you an enormous amount of patience and latitude. All you have to do is call and tell them that you can't pay them. They will ask you a few questions, then take your word in regards to your income, employment status, and expenses without asking for so much a a shred of proof, and most likely grant you a deferment of forbearance.

When I couldn't find a job about 5 years ago, at first I got by on deferment for about 6 months, after which a had to bite the bullet and take a job way beneath my education level. When I called to tell them that I was now able to pay about 50% of my payment every month, they offered to keep the deferment in place so my partial payments would go entirely to principal. Yes, that's correct - they had even stopped the interest for the entire deferment period. They stopped time itself to help me. Once I had gotten on my feet I started full repayment. When I lost that job before I'd had a chance to save and build an unemployment hedge, they did it for me again.

They withhold transcripts in cases where students have dodged them, avoided them, and failed to acknowledge the debt.

I put all three kids though the UNC system, Chapel-Hill, NC State and Greensboro + grad school with no debt to me or to them. Maybe NYU and the Ivies and Columbia and all the rest need to re examine the efficacy of charging ridiculous sums of money especially in this economy. And increasing rates at 2x the rate of inflation year over year over year every year for the last 30 years. Maybe students need to re examine the efficacy of getting an MFA in post modern Marxist-Anarchist-Lesbian critical literary theory when literally the only job they can get is teaching that to the next crop of like minded students. Maybe parents need to stop enabling their kids to do whatever they like wherever they like for whatever it costs when it doesn't cost the students anything or they've convinced themselves that going a hundred thousand dollars in the hole is no big thing because they're a special snowflake and somebody somewhere will swoop in to bail them out. I got news for you. Anyone who MARRIES someone with huge student debt is an enormous idiot. So all the snowflakes should all work that crap out before they move on to the next phase of their lives, which no doubt will be moving in with their parents for Adolescence II, The New Beginning.

I have zero sympathy for anyone involved in this, just like the janitors who took out liar loans on half million dollar houses and now cry to Mother Government to bail them out because the banks went broke selling smoke and bullshit to EACH OTHER. Jesus Christ in a shopping cart does ANYONE bother with due diligence anymore?

Nice that you paid for your kids. Would that every parent could do so, would that every child could count on it.

Your vision is very narrow and takes into account only people in similar circumstances as yourself.

I haven't lived with my parents since I was eight years old as they weren't able, in many ways including financially, to take care of me. I certainly could not count on them to pay my Uni tuition for me.

I, like others who don't have parents who can pay for them, took on a heavy load of student debt in order to get an education and increase my prospects for putting myself in a position where I could pay for my children's education at some point in the future because you know what? If I wanted an education I had no other choice.

Your lack of 'sympathy' for people who don't have parents to pay for their education is unfortunate. If enough people think like you then anyone who isn't so fortunate as your children will continue to be completely fucked.

Your similar lack of sympathy for poor people who got sold a bill of goods by financial institutions to follow 'the American dream' and lost what little they had, not to mention all the folks who HAD good jobs and lost them due to the failing economy and could thus no longer afford to make their normally reasonable mortgage payments, losing their homes and looking to their government to support them is similarly unfortunate. I can only hope that you have the chance to experience similar misfortune at some point in your life so that you can gain some perspective.

And if word gets out, maybe we can deter the incoming freshman from this self-destructive strategy.Taking out student loans for an undergraduate degree is just stupid and lazy.It leads to the lifelong debt cycle Americans are increasingly trapped in.

That didn't work for me. The college district sent me an extortion note years later claiming that I owed them money. Thing is that I don't owe them any money and it's an impossibility that I owe money for that term as they won't let you register for classes if you haven't paid and I took classes the next quarter. They still haven't unlocked the account. I'll probably have to file suit against the college if I want my transcripts unlocked as sending them a letter demanding evidence that I owe money didn't work and student loans aren't subject to any statute of limitations on collections.

I'm still not sure why they felt the need to send out fraudulent bills other than the budget conditions now, but unfortunately, filing a lawsuit against the state is likely the only way in which I'll get it permanently cleared up.

If the government REALLY "got in the middle", this wouldn't be a problem in the first place since public colleges and universities would be dirt cheap or even free, as they are in most other OECD countries.

In fact if you look at tuition, aside from Australia, the US government is less-involved in college education than any other developed country in the world.

It's the same as the goddamn health care "arguments" from the US right.

"We have too much government involvement! Of course it's expensive! If we get the damn government out the market will fix everything!"Yeah, maybe, I guess. Or we could do the opposite of what you're saying and get guaranteed results, as proven in reality, not some ideological model.

If this pattern continues, next the poor dumb bastards will start arguing that government-subsidized education infringes on the average american's right to start and run a student loan corporation, or to choose which loan corporation fucks them in the ass.

Of course it can be fair. If restraining one person for the benefit of another were absolutely and in all cases unfair, then any law whatsoever is unfair. It's a matter of degrees, and yeah, people don't seem to agree where the line is, but it doesn't mean people who don't agree with you are freedom-haters or whatever.

All civilization is compromise; wise use of government is recognizing when said compromise yields sufficient benefits (cost savings, strategic advantage, freedoms) to outweigh the costs (som

What exactly is our $600+ billion military budget protecting us (or other countries) from? No other governments want to attack us because their countries are too busy selling stuff to us. A few terrorists (which will ALWAYS be around, ESPECIALLY when you spend $600 billion annually on new explosives to destroy their communities and take their resources) don't qualify as a threat to an entire country's national security. Even if they did (and there would need to be A LOT of sporadic attacks to argue that), how exactly do gigantic fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, fighter jets, rocket launchers, tanks, and all other sorts of things (which have together ended a grand total of 0 extremist ideologies) "secure" us?

And anyway, it's fairly obvious that I meant "free" in the same way that a pre-college education is free. And substantially cheaper per capita than private alternatives. It's astounding how much public services can provide when they're actually made to service the public instead of a few rich people.

As a Canadian, where the government is heavily involved in both providing student loans and subsidizing education, I have to say that you're totally wrong.

I graduated in 2004 with an Electrical Engineering degree. The total I had in student loans was $0. (zero) Co-op paid for most of my expenses. Courses were about $400, six per term, a total of $2400 per semester. (I know, holy shit, right?) Books were the typical ass-rape, but in the non-lubed Canadian version. (A couple of books were $120, lots at $80, I eventually just gave 'em all away.) I was not living with my parents, and rent was about $500 a month.

It's dirty socialism, right? Nope, it's long-term thinking. I pay more in taxes now than I did before I got my degree since I'm earning 2.5x what I got when I started school. I'll be paying 2.5x more taxes (more actually, since we have progressive taxes up here) for the rest of my career.

Can you understand that such a system actually sounds more desirable to many people, because they consider helping others and their society as a whole to be a higher virtue than enriching themselves? It would be nice if everyone did this voluntarily, but unfortunately there are people who think they made it to the top all on their own and so shouldn't have to pay back into the system. Those people have to be dragged forward by the rest of society that would rather see every succeed somewhat, than a few people succeed immensely and many fall by the wayside.

The point is the college is owed no money, it has been paid, it therefore has no reason whatsoever to hold up the release of transcripts. If the school was giving you the loans, it would be a different story and they could do as they please, but when the facts are

interesting argument, and I am all for allowing the 3rd party the right to do as it pleases, however the point remains, party A gives me a loan, I pay party B in full for (insert item / service here) party A should not be able to bypass me and go to party B for any reason, party A has no relationship with party B in practice. If a friend lends me money to buy a car, he cant go too the dealership and demand they hold the title until I pay him back

If a friend lends me money to buy a car, he cant go too the dealership and demand they hold the title until I pay him back

If your friend loans you money to buy a car and doesn't get his name on the title as a leinholder, then he's stupid or else a really really good friend that really really trusts you not to fuck him over by selling the car and keeping all the money. If he's on the title as a leinholder, he can, indeed, prevent the transfer of that title to any other person, and is first in line for any insurance payments when you break it.

The government isn't your friend and doesn't really really trust you. They are a lein

Is this different than getting a loan to buy a car? You get a third party loan, you pay the car dealer, you drive off the lot. You have the car. In this case, you got a third party loan, you used it to get a degree.

You aren't prevented from getting those transcripts to provide to a potential employer unless you are behind in payments. Kinda like a repo man coming for the car you aren't making payments on.
What happened to the concept that if you borrow money from someone to buy something and then don't pa

because there is no proper analogy between a service provided by an educational institution and a physical good, and it's not possible in any meaningful sense to take a college degree from somebody.

There is no way to take the information and education from someone, but in a very real sense, if you are applying for a job where they want you to prove you have a college degree and you cannot get the college to send a transcript, the college has taken the degree away from you. Thus, the reposession of a vehicle for failure to pay the loan is a very real and applicable analogy. The only failure is in who the contractual parties are, and those are set by the loan agreement signed originally.

U.S. Department of EducationOffice of ManagementRegulatory Information Management Services400 Maryland Avenue, SW, LBJ 2W220Washington, DC 20202-4536ATTN: FOIA Public LiaisonDear FOIA Public Liaison:This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act.* I request that a copy of th e following documents (or documents containing the following information)be provided to me (identify the documents or information as specifically as possible):* In order to help to determine my status to assess fees, you should

Debtor's prisons were real and need no quote marks. As late as the 19th century, if you owed debts you could not pay, you could be literally imprisoned in a workhouse where your tiny wages went to pay off the debt, often far insufficient to make headway paying it off. The poster is not insensitive, but rather has a better history education than you.
The dilemma is that in order to pay off your student loans you need decent work, but in order to get decent work you need to pay off your student loans.

by that logic if I am using the same bank that you are using, I should be able to put a lein on your house if you owe the bank I affiliate with any money.

No, by the logic being used, the BANK should be able to "put a lein on" (and has, the day he signed the mortgage) the house if he owes them any money. And they should be able to (and will) reposess (foreclose) if he stops paying them back what he owes.

In this case, the government has put a lein on the product that you purchased using the money you borrowed from them, and are foreclosing only because you aren't paying them back like you promised you would. The fact is the limitation on getting a transcript

If Americans wern't so stupidly paranoid about socialism, they could have a govt student loan scheme like we have in Australia where the HECS scheme operates, a small extra percentage is deducted with your tax once you reach a certain wage. Of course that, like decent social health care not going to happen in the backwards US.

And what kind of thing would that be? Businesses demanding payment for services rendered? Or gubmint demanding payment of money owed? Try not paying your taxes Mr Teat Partier, and see what happens.

What this needs is a car analogy:

You need insurance for your car, so you buy some from ABC, and put in on your Visa credit card. So far so good.

Then some idiot rear ends your car... so you call your insurance company, and they tell you your claim can't be processed because you missed a payment on your credit card, and they won't honor your insurance until you repay Visa.

See why this is both weird and wrong? Your insurance is paid up, and paid in full. Its none of ABC's business whether or not your account with visa is in good standing. That's between you and Visa.

That's the problem that is happening here. The government (taking Visas place) loaned the student money to purchase an education. The student then used that money to purchase an education from the school (taking the insurance companies place). So the transaction between you and the school is complete, and the school was paid in full for your education.

Its no more more the school's business to collect payment on your student loan than it is the insurance companies business to do collections for Visa.

Government needs to get out of the business of supplying endless money to students. This is the exact reason why college tuition has skyrocketed in recent years. Universities don't have to care about keeping expenses low, they just need to feed all the students through the government loan line effectively. If loans had to be secured only through private means or at LEAST the gov loans were very low, universities would have to lower prices to keep getting new students.

Some countries pay--not loan--100% of the tuition for a fairly large percentage of their student population and don't seem to have the runaway cost problems that we do.

As with most situations like this, there's clearly a solution other than "the government needs to get out of the business of X". Maybe it should, but it doesn't need to; it may just need to do it better. What do places like Denmark do differently? Can we try that, rather than just giving up?

Very true, I live in one of those places where the government can give you 100% of the tuition if you're below a set income.

It works because our education establishments are non-profits, usually registered as charities (state owned schools are non-profit by nature, but you can open your own private non-profit school if you want). There is no profit motive, so there is no drive to milk the system for money, therefore we don't have runaway costs.

People don't work at at these places to make boatloads of money, they do it for education/research/furthering knowledge/etc... If they wanted to make money, they could do that in all sorts of private companies that exist.

They tax the bejeezus out of their people [wikipedia.org]. Danish sales tax is a whopping 25% (second only to Hungary) and their MEAN income tax rate is over 40%. Don't kid yourself (or mislead others) -- a Danish student pays more dearly for his "free" education over the course of his life than even the most debt-saddled American student ever will.

My income tax rate's not far under that, all things considered, and I do all right but I'm far from rich (FICA is a bitch--a regressive-ass bitch). For it, I get poor transportation infrastructure (my state's roads are exceptionally bad, to say nothing of public transit, or rather, the lack of it), no help toward health care (so, like most, my health and my family's is dependent on my employment; there's a nice extra risk to discourage entrepreneurship), and some minimal aid toward education should I want to use it (didn't before, don't expect that I will).

I'd happily pay another 10% or so to gain what people in many (most?) other OECD nations have--I'd be a fool not to, since it's a bargain.

What I've found is that most of the people who whine about high taxes and say that they prefer the American solution fit into one of three categories:

Greedy 'I got mine' Rich Person: They make enough money that the lack of public infrastructure and government support doesn't impact them in a meaningful way and want to hoard as much money as possible, presumably so they can pretend they're Scrooge McDuck and swim in a pile of gold. They don't give a shit about the hoi polloi and despise having to give anything back to the society that enabled their success.

Wannabe Rich Person: They've bought into the lie that all it takes to become super-rich is a bit of hard work and want to be one of the above jack-asses when they get there so they support low taxes and deny the need for government help even though it would benefit them greatly as they are now because they think it'll make things better once they 'make it big'. They don't realize that realistically, you need to be either incredibly lucky or be born into it to get rich enough that lower taxes actually benefit you more than the complete lack of adequate social services that enables such low rates hurts you.

Free Market Drone: Maybe they read a bit too much Ayn Rand. Maybe someone forced them to watch Cold-War era propaganda films for days on end, Clockwork Orange style, perhaps a Marxist molested them as a child. Whatever the reason, this is a true believer. Unlike the other two, this isn't sociopathic self-interest (or the delusion of future such self-interest) but rather a genuine belief that the government is always evil, the market is always right, lower taxes are always better and that completely unfettered markets would lead to anything other than a cyberpunk dystopia.

In the UK, tuition fees were introduced some years ago - previously the government subsidised your first degree more-or-less 100% (though you still had to find money to live on). The amount the university could demand of students was capped and a student could take out a government-backed loan to cover it; needless to say every single university in the country immediately started charging precisely the level of the cap, no more, no less.

The issues with your argument is that you canw alk back one step further and see that all these things are requirements by the governmentstudent aid? many government loans there so your not really correct there food, government requires schools to provide food to XX standards, you need XX permits to operate at a school, blame the regulation there

houseing, what? most student housing around any campus I have been around minus the dorms (which are owned by the schools 90% of the time) are private owned by and

How the hell is anyone supposed to be educated in anything, if they can't get any hands on experience?

Washing the dishes in the University food court is just as valuable of an educational experience as sitting in the classroom taking notes. Working in the university printing room is certainly worthwhile. So is maintaining a university email system....etc etc. Outsourcing all this stuff is absolutely the wrong thing for an

Dude... ^^ THIS. Seriously....the University I attended (Michigan "Technological" University) recently outsourced their email, groupware, etc to Google.....I'm like, what the fuck?? You teach computer programming and IT, and presume to be a top tier engineering school, but can't even maintain your own basic IT systems? Do you not see how you are outsourcing your core competency and denying your students the ability to get real world hands on experience fixing this stuff?

That's the argument I made on Facebook anyhow, and several drones (you know the type....19 year olds who think repeating establishment propaganda is the same thing as making a logical argument) immediately attacked me saying I didn't know what I was talking about. OK then, fine kids...stick your fingers in your ears and whistle. Actions have consequences. Enjoy your $100k in student debt when you're unemployed, and too stupid and inexperienced to get a job....asshat.

Google Apps for Education is free. There are a lot of good reasons not to use it, but your argument of "enjoy your $100k in student debt" doesn't fly - the University can reduce its costs by outsourcing email. That in turn reduces student fees, which reduces student debt.

A lot of people like Google Apps. Perhaps they did it not out of laziness, but by considering the feature set students need. Many university use crappy webmail clients like Horde or Squirrel Mail... the UX of Gmail is far ahead of those. Google Docs has excellent real-time collaboration features. There are plenty of ways for students to get hands-on experience without avoiding useful web applications.

Well, you don't know what you're talking about. The IT system at the University isn't a learning lab where mistakes can be made and the entire system can be wiped clean every semester to make way for the new batch of fiddlers. There are privacy requirements that must be adhered to.

The fact is they can maintain their basic IT systems. It just costs more than using Google. If you want real world experience pay attenion: there are a lot more people in this world managing vendor relationships then there are pro

When I was working on a CS degree, one of the work study jobs a number of people in CS could get was computer operator on the campus computer system, which in fact gave them the keys to the kingdom. Unsurprisingly, the world didn't end as a result, nor were the operators grades ever 4.0 across the board.

Your other option when you can't afford it is to take things step by step. Get your associates, take a step forward in your career. Get your bachelors, take a step forward in your career. Get your masters, etc. Sure you don't become a PhD by age 25 this way, but shockingly, life is not "fair."

Step 1: Finish highschoolStep 2: Pick a trade, something fun but challenging.Step 3: Get ticket, and work for someone for awhile.Step 4: Quit, use all those contacts you've been building up for the last 6-7 years and start a business of your own.Step 5: Hire an apprentice or two, then run the business.Step 6: Enjoy the money.

I still find it funny that the majority of people on/. think that the only way to get good money is to have a university education. Skip it, get a trade.

'Tis not the paying back of loans that is in question here, but how to do it as quickly and completely as possible.

I have a friend who attended what is considered by some lists as one of the most expensive universities in the US. Putting aside his lifestyle choices and various other problems (parents are divorced, and he changed his major 3 times), he has supposedly completed all of his requirements for graduation (started off in IT, ended up in Marketing). Anyway, without that last payment, he cannot gradu

AFAIK, although there are no federal laws that require a university to withhold transcripts of students that are in default of their student loans, it is apparently highly encouraged by the department of education to withhold the transcript if a Title IV loan is in default.

However, some states have actual laws that require institutions to withhold transcripts. For instance, California Section 66022 of the California Education Code provides that...

The governing board of every community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the Board of Directors of the Hastings College of the Law shall adopt regulations providing for the withholding of institutional services from students or formerstudents who have been notified in writing at the student's or former student's last known address that he or she is in default on a loan or loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The regulations shall specify the services to be withheld from the student and may include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) The provision of grades. (2) The provision of transcripts. (3) The provision of diplomas.

Also, many states (incl CA), penalize institutions that have high default rates (for instance by not making them eligible for state student loan programs like Cal Grants), so even private institutions have an incentive to help get the default rates down so they can continue to offer those loan sources to future students even if they aren't required by law to do so.

Same here. Twenty years ago a business would see that and say "Hey, this person is motivated and hard working because they busted their ass working to pay the bills while doing college full time and they have a 3.5+ GPA" and hire you. Now companies see that and say "Oh, you don't know how to use *specific software only someone who's already had the position you're applying for would have used* because you were busy working to pay the bills? Fuck you".